Consider how much of our lives are dominated by our feelings.

We take feelings for granted and let them run our lives by default. I guess that would be okay if all our feelings made us feel great. However, many of our feelings are negative and make us feel bad!

Add to that mix the idea that what we think and feel will be mirrored in our lives and we can easily see how much of the negative stuff in our lives has been generated by us quite unwittingly! Our thoughts are like rocket ships and our feelings are rocket fuel and in combination they take us to where we either want to go or where we don’t want to go. Continue reading →

Lets wind back the clock.

When we are born we arrive psychically intact and whole. As very young children we spontaneously expressed our true selves – warts and all often to the disapproval of our parents and other family members!

However, through a process of domestication we somehow lost touch with our real selves. An internal psychic split was created through this process and the split is between our “true authentic selves” and the “false selves”  which grow out of our socialisation experiences.

The “false selves” quickly assert dominance over our “true selves” which get buried by the layers and layers of mental constructs that are required to keep the false selves in place.

It is this very split which is responsible for that nagging feeling we have that there is something missing from our lives and of course there is. Unfortunately we only perpetuate this split by looking in all the wrong places for what is missing. Continue reading →

The Fifth Agreement

“Be skeptical, but learn to listen”

Being skeptical is quite different from being cynical. It requires you to listen carefully to what is being said and then to not just accept what you are being told at face value.

Always keep an open and questioning mind through asking yourself:

• does this sound right?
• should I check the veracity of what is being said further?
• who can I double check this with?
• what is my “gut” feeling about this?

It can sometimes be difficult to keep a “doubting mind” especially as we are taught to believe what we are told from a very young age.

Consequently there can be a tendency just to accept what the media, our bosses, our politicians and our clergy etc tell us without ever questioning the truth or not of what is being said and held out to be truth.

We have already seen with the other four agreements that our idea of truth can be quite different to others ideas about the same thing. It is therefore prudent that we take time to consider what is being communicated and to sit with that for a period of time before responding to it or taking it on board as truth. Continue reading →

The Fourth Agreement

“Always do your best”

This sounds like something from a Scout meeting – “dib dib dib we will do our best.”

That aside I believe that in a world gone mad where we are taught that we should always aspire to achieve “perfection” this Agreement is just the tonic we need.

The truth is that we are all perfect beings in the perfectly right place at the perfectly right time doing things perfectly! We are already that which we seek to be.

This state of perfection is not some objective standard against which we can be measured in ourselves and on our performance.

As we have seen with the other Agreements we all live our lives in a subjective personal virtual reality. Nobody else in existence has or will see things exactly the way that you do.

This being so then your subjective standard of perfection can only be “your best” which means to the best of your desire and ability at the present moment in time bearing in mind that your best may vary from moment to moment depending on what is happening in your dream of life at any particular point in time.

In any situation where we try to achieve some vague external objective level of perfection we will always be met by frustration and failure.

Why would we in any event want to pursue somebody else’s idea of perfection given the very different and unique perspectives that influence our individual behaviours.

Your best will always be just perfect for you!

The Third Agreement

“Don’t make assumptions”

There is some truth to be found in the old saying that “when you make an assumption you make an “ass of u and me“!

This follows on from our discussion of the Second Agreement in which we learned that there was no point in taking things personally as we all have very unique and different perspectives which can often result in unintended misunderstandings and dramas in our communications with others.

When we make an assumption about what someone else says or does we are literally superimposing our own perspectives over theirs and reaching conclusions based on those. It is not surprising therefore that when someone says “A,B, C” we assume they are saying “X,Y, Z”!

Its a bit like standing in an Art Gallery and looking at a modern free form painting and instead of making an objective study of the painting we subjectively interpret what we see. What we see can be dramatically different from what the artist intended unless of course the intent of the artist was to make a painting which evokes a purely subjective response.

This process is not unlike holding a mirror up in front of us and describing what we see! Its all a matter of perspective.

Is there any real surprise then that there is so much drama and conflict in our personal relationships? Much of the time when we attempt to communicate we seem to be a cross purposes. Continue reading →

The Second Agreement

“Don’t take things personally”

When you realise that everyone has created for themselves and lives within their own virtual reality or dream of life you can more easily understand that what another person says or does is not so much a comment about you personally but more a reflective comment about themselves and what they believe.

You can place two people in the same set of circumstances and still end up with two very distinct accounts of what happened. This is because everything we observe, do and say is filtered by our personal definitions and meanings which we have accepted and agreed form part of reality as we know it.This is our own virtual reality or movie about life.

We are the directors and stars of our own movies and everyone else plays the role of secondary characters. We have written our movie scripts according to our own stories and in languages unique to us.

As we have all had very unique and different experiences in life there is no surprise that what we see and convey about our observations will not be the same as others! Continue reading →

The Toltec were an ancient civilization who lived in southern Mexico at Teotihuacan (which means “where man becomes God”), the ancient city of pyramids.

The Toltec lived and taught a spiritual way of life which has been preserved and handed down through generations. At the heart of this way of life and teaching were the so-called “Five Agreements”.

Over the next few articles I will be discussing these Agreements and how they may be useful to us today.

The First Agreement

“Be impeccable with your word”

This Agreement reflects the power of the word. The Bible states that “In the beginning God created the word” and it was through the word and its primal sound that the Universe was created.

The word is a messenger of intent and comprises all the symbols we have created and the meanings we have attributed to them. This is how we communicate with each other. If we didn’t have symbols for say a “tree” for example how would we know when someone else was talking about a tree? How also could we think unless we had a language made up of word symbols with agreed meanings that we can use to create our thoughts? Continue reading →

Love is a much bandied around word. Yet I suspect not many people really understand what it means to them personally.

It is easy to say “I love you” and when we hear these words we feel so good. On a practical level those words affect us emotionally. They makes us feel appreciated, valued and of worth to others.

So what is it about these simple words that gives them so much power?

The reason we use these words is that we want to reciprocally hear and feel their powerful effect for ourselves when uttered by another. The effect that these simple words have is not so much different from the effect that other external stimulators can have on our senses and feelings.

Love is a drug!

Yet it is our personal power that we give away when we rely on others for approval and acceptance. The person we express our love to feels that power and enjoys it. It makes them feel good particularly if they are unable to generate those feelings for themselves.

However, apart from how expressions of love make us feel physiologically any “notion or attempt to define love” can only be a construct of the mind. It will mean different things to different people. So when you express your love to another that other’s perspective of love and what you are conveying to them may be completely different from yours.

This is where much conflict arises in personal relationships. We assume that others feel and interpret things in the same way and when we discover that this not the case we feel hurt and betrayed. Continue reading →

There’s an old Biblical saying that goes something like “only children will enter the kingdom of heaven”.  Much objective truth can be distilled from these very simple words.

Let’s begin by turning back the life clock to when you were born. You were born a unique individual with an inbuilt programme that was yours alone. You expressed yourself freely and uniquely. You did what made you feel happy. You held within you a life of untapped potential.

At the ages of 3 – 4 years old your development and mental processes were quite undeveloped and so much of your experience about life was limited to how you were feeling in the moment. You felt happy, you felt sad, you felt excited, you felt pain, you felt pleasure….This was your truth.

There would have been minimal self-talk because you wouldn’t have yet acquired the mental ability to linguistically translate experiential feelings into understanding knowledge and to store that as memory.

Consequently your ability to store information as memories would have been limited to visual queues and also your ability to make projections about the future would similarly have been limited.

You’re attention would have been predominantly focussed on what was occurring in the moment. Either that made you happy or it didn’t. There was no interpretative story based around the feelings.

Children of that age live from moment to moment and when they do something it takes all their attention. They immerse themselves in what they are doing 100% and are object orientated.

These children are spontaneously authentic. This is their “Reality”. Sounds like Heaven to me! Continue reading →